Consciousness and the Social Brain

the body is so obvious that we don’t normally think much about it. But the spatial structure of awareness becomes more obvious when something goes wrong and that spatial structure is disrupted in an illusion. In the out-of-body experience, awareness is mislocalized to a place outside the body. 1
    Out-of-body experiences are traditionally reported in states close to sleep or near death or under partial anesthesia. One difficulty with studying this type of experience is that the mental functions of the person are so impaired that it is difficult to accept the report. It is difficult to disentangle a genuine perceptual illusion from a garbled account or a confused memory. However, the out-of-body experience can be induced reliably in a laboratory by putting people in a highly controlled, virtual-reality environment and by manipulating visual feedback and somatosensory feedback. 2 , 3 People can be made to feel as though they are floating in empty space or even as though they were magically transported to a location inside of another body. The self feels as though it is somewhere other than inside one’s proper body.
    An out-of-body illusion can also be induced by applying electrical stimulation to a specific region of the cerebral cortex. In one experiment, the scientist Blanke and colleagues 4 electrically stimulated the cortical surface of a human subject whose brain was temporarily exposed during a medically required surgery. As is typical during such brain surgeries, the patient was under local anesthesia and was therefore awake and able to report experiences. Electrical stimulation was applied to the surface of the cortex on the right side of the brain in a specific region called the temporo-parietal junction (TPJ). The stimulation temporarily scrambled the natural signals in this brain area. As a result, an out-of-body experience was induced. The patient felt as though she were floating outside her own body. The stimulation evidently interfered with the machinery that normally assigns a location to one’s own mind.
    The out-of-body illusion highlights a specific property of awareness: awareness comes with a computed spatial arrangement. Evidently, machinery in the brain computes one’s awareness and assigns it a perceived source inside one’s body, and interference with the relevant circuitry results in an error in the computation. The out-of-body illusion therefore reveals something quite specific about the information set,
A
, that defines awareness. That information set must include spatial information. Awareness is computed to be a thingthat exists roughly
here
, at this or that location. The location is not so precisely defined as a point in space. Instead it is vaguely inside the body, usually inside the head.
    Blanke and colleagues 5 suggested that there is a primacy to constructing a body-centered understanding of oneself, a model of oneself as a physical being with a location and a specific spatial perspective on the external world. Constructing this physical understanding of the self is, in their view, important to the construction of consciousness. This view is certainly consistent with the attention schema theory. Awareness is a computed property, and at least one part of it is a computed spatial embodiment.
The Feeling of Being Stared At

    When you have a face-to-face conversation with another person, so many perceptions and cognitive models are present regarding tone of voice, facial expression, gesture, and the semantic meaning of the other person’s words that it is difficult to isolate the specific perceptual experience of the other person’s awareness. Yet there is one circumstance in which extraneous perceptions are minimized and the perception of someone else’s awareness is relatively isolated and thus more obvious. Most people are familiar with the feeling that someone is staring at them from behind. 6 , 7 Although some mystics may believe this to be an instance of the supernatural, perhaps a direct sensing of someone else’s thoughts, the phenomenon seems instead to be more mundane. Context, expectation, and subtle sounds and shadows form the physical basis of it, as Titchner found in his experiments more than a hundred years ago. 7
    Because the feeling that someone is staring at you is so linked to the pseudoscientific fringe, it has unfortunately been largely ignored by scientists for a century. The phenomenon is actually quite interesting. Some set of conditions affects the